The Big-Brained Superheroes Club at Yesler Community Center is creating a marine ecosystem out of recyclables, Micro:bit microcontrollers, servos, motors, LEDs, and sensors. Starting with our plastic bag moon jelly and continuing with our sea turtles made from deli pie containers and bubble wrap along with other animals in production, we’re exploring food webs and interspecies connections through our robotic ecosystem. In the process, we’re learning how certain manmade materials, such as plastics, can be both marvelously malleable and deeply damaging.

As a short exercise, we did a quick rundown of how this project combines science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM), and thought you might be interested in the outcome:

Science: In planning the development of their robotic sea creatures, Big Brains analyze the behaviors of aquatic animals in their natural environments so as to incorporate that information into their robot designs.

Engineering: To develop functioning robotic sea creatures, Big Brains combine their scientific understanding of how these animals move with their technological knowledge. They also learn and deploy relatively complex mechanical engineering concepts, such as how to translate rotational motion to linear motion.

Art: To create believable and relatable sea creatures out of nontraditional materials, Big Brains learn to find their creatures’ defining characteristics and communicate those characteristics through their work.

Math: To create realistic and functioning robotic sea creatures, Big Brains learn about and deploy diverse mathematical concepts. For instance, when assessing the power requirements for their robots, Big Brains develop and reinforce skills in multiplying, dividing, and adding decimals and fractions. And when translating rotational motion into linear motion, Big Brains leverage geometric concepts, such as how to divide a circle into degrees of arc.

There’s a lot more that goes into these types of projects, and one day it would be interesting to traceback all the various inputs, processes, and outputs that make these kinds of things happen. Even relatively small projects, such as those on which we embark in The BBSC, layer in so many sources of inspiration and knowledge and require so many different kinds of resources that accomplishing any small part of them can start to feel like an act of phenomenal wizardry. But the truth is that there are just a bunch of moving parts involved, and we should just put in the time and effort to wrap our brains around as many of them as we can. For Science. (And Technology. And Engineering…)

In part one of our Elements of a Big Brain Storm story, we discussed the most visible and discrete aspects of our Brain Storms: the activities. These activities are analogous to the lightning of our storms because they’re the most obvious aspects of what we do, and their contours are most easily discerned. In this part of the story, we’ll try to articulate the less easily individuated elements of our storms: some of the underlying qualities that sort of blend together to make up the feeling or vibe that reverberates through the very best Big Brain Storms. The thunder of the Big Brain Storm is probably most easily articulated through example:

At one point during our open house party in December, one of our partygoers figured out how to illuminate our Galaxy of Light, and the room suddenly burst into applause. And before that, a Big-Brained Superhero initiated the nerding up of the The BBSC City of Light by deciding to add that galaxy. And before that, that very Big Brain got his galactic inspiration from when he tagged onto a NASA newscast project other Big Brains were developing in preparation for our Pizza, Planets, and PJs Party devoted to Hidden Figures. And before that, Big Brains started throwing Pizza, Planets, and PJs parties to watch @neildegrassetysonofficial’s reboot of Cosmos on the community center tv when it first came out in 2014. In the midst of all that was the collective development of the City of Light, circuit wall, and Cardboard Godzilla, each of which has its own origin story that feeds directly into our galaxy.

So, what exactly is the origin story for the Galaxy of Light? Where, when, how, and why does it start and end? Or does it end? For such a tiny, insignificant patchwork, there are quite a few threads. From Elements of a Big Brain Storm: part 1 (the lightning), we can easily see some of the basic elements that went into the creation of our galaxy: circuits, science, storytelling, etc. But those are just the technologies deployed. Underneath, around, and within those elements are continual conversations between and among Big Brains, Big Buddies, and volunteer sidekicks about who we are, what we’re doing, and how we’re going about the business of building our Universe.

Since we’re frequently talking input, process, output when discussing robotics/computational thinking, we’ll apply this framework to describing what we consider to be some of the most important elements of our Big Brain Storms:

Input areas of interest include:

From where are Big Brains drawing their inspiration?

How many sources of inspiration (including senses) are they using?

How wide is their range of source material?

How specific and nuanced are their observations of both their immediate environment and whatever other source material they are using?

Process areas of interest include:

Are Big Brains having fun?

How adventurous are Big Brains being when choosing their projects and activities?

How much are Brains challenging themselves?

How specific and thought-out are their questions?

How are they going about answering their questions?

Are they working together and getting help from other Brains?

How are they contributing to the community?

Output areas of interest include:

Are Big Brains achieving their goals?

Are their achievements more permanent/tangible or are they more transitory/intangible?

How are individual and collective Big Brain achievements building on each other?

These being elements that generate some of the thunder of our Big Brain Storms, we don’t have any preset or predetermined answers to these questions. We haven’t studied the exact number of optimal inspiration sources a Brain should be leveraging, for example. It’s possible the number is out there, of course, but with so many variables within any given Brain Storm, we’re skeptical that we’ll find one number to rule them all. So, we go with the, for lack of a better word, vibe. We feel it and sense it more than we typically see it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real or not important. In fact, if anything, the vibe is often where it all begins.

To make up for not having a more complete understanding/explanation of these elements, we offer the God of Thunder:

On Mondays and Wednesdays from 5 to 7pm in The Big-Brained Superheroes Club, Big-Brained Superheroes drop in and engage in Big Brain Storm activities, which we loosely group into three interrelated categories: Recycled Robotics, Math and Spatial Relationship Skill-building, and Storytelling. Though relatively confident in our collective ability to nerd up nearly any activity (’what’ is generally much less important than ‘how’ for us), there is at least a tiny bit of method to our madness in all things. Here are the ‘what’ we do in Big Brain Storm meetings and our understood rationale for doing it:

Why: Where to start? There are a myriad of ways in which to understand the ‘why’ behind our gravitation toward recycled robotics, but let’s stick with a few of the moderately prosaic reasons for now. Big Brains use recycled robotics as a platform to explore several useful concepts related to technological, human, and social development:

Ar-ti-cu-la-tion: In many ways, understanding how to build a robot can be analogous to understanding how we build ourselves. When we’re developing robots, we are thinking about their inputs (their observations and influences from the physical world), their desired outputs (the specific ways in which we want them to affect or influence the world), and their processes—both intentional (code) and unintentional (bugs)—that connect, or fail to connect, their inputs and their outputs. In our ideal world, Big-Brained Superheroes have infinite power over each of these elements of their own lives, and gaining that power can, if we do it right, start through analyzing and manipulating them externally—in this case, through building robots.

Connection: Sure, it’s perfectly fine to build fully independent robots, but we’d rather build robots that respond to and initiate communication (behavioral or otherwise) with each other or some other part of The Big-Brained Superhero Universe. In our ideal world, not only do Big-Brained Superheroes have ultimate power over how they observe, understand, and interact with the world as individuals, they think about the systemic affects of their individual actions and how systems in turn affect them. Placing our robots in an interactive world in which communication drives communication gives us a useful opportunity to discuss how our own communications influence each other.

Creativity: Creativity, generally, and metaphorical thinking, in particular, are ways in which human and social development have thus far diverged from technological development. We’ve learned how to create robots to analyze and interact with the world, but we haven’t yet learned to create a robot that can look at a pile of used cardboard and plastic packaging material and envision a robot. So, using recyclables to create our robots gives us an opportunity to exercise those more complex functions of our brains that make Big-Brained Superheroes creators of worlds rather than just products of them.

Why: Though this activity class started out as a way to fulfill the immediate wants and needs of Big-Brained Super Shorties (Big Brains roughly 7 and under), it has evolved as a fundamental platform for engaging and nerding up Big Brains of all ages and interests. We’ve used the materials in all kinds of randomly fun ways, including in completing what we call The LEGO Challenge (finding an image in a book and challenging Brains to build it out of LEGO in a timed situation and then having the rest of the club evaluate their work), using the dots on the LEGO pieces to discuss how addition, multiplication, and fractions work, and making things float with Magformers. To name a few. These stations are always available to Big Brains during Big Brain Storms and thus can also serve as social play areas during project breaks.

Aside from all the immediate value that we see ourselves, we are persuaded as to the longer term value of these activities by the social science on them:

Spatial skills are positively correlated with standardized test scores, motivation for learning, STEM major declaration, and number of science courses taken. Our analysis also indicates that the cumulative, informal training of childhood play has the ability to increase spatial reasoning. Spatial skill scores were significantly higher among students who played action, construction, or sports video games in childhood. Male and female students display significant differences in spatial skills, especially for mental rotation, with males outperforming females. However, gender disparities are fully mediated after adjusting for a variety of academic factors and whether students frequently played with construction-based toys.

For whatever directions Big-Brained Superheroes choose to go in life, their brains require preparation. Meaningful access to these toys can help make that possible.

Why: Again, we have so many reasons underlying our interest in storytelling, it’s hard to know where to begin. For starters, if we want to get people to our People, Planets, and PJs Party, it helps to consider what tools we can use to persuade them. And if we’re going to present our Jellyfish Robot at the Black in Tech hackathon at Facebook, we’re going to want to construct our presentation in a way that holds everyone’s interest. And we can go on and on about how good stories engage our brains in helpful ways (empathy, kindness, teamwork—all those superpowers). But all these practical considerations aside, we have a more basic rationale for integrating this category of activities into our Big Brain Storms. The tools and techniques used in storytelling can, when thoughtfully explored and applied, help our Big Brains become better observers, thinkers, and communicators.

If this sounds a lot like our rationale for leveraging Recycled Robotics as a platform in The BBSC, then it should. Input (observation)—process (thinking)—output (communication) can pretty much sum up how we understand what we do in Big Brain Storms as skill in those areas is fairly fundamental to the act of creation. Which is a perfect example of why ‘how’ is much more important to us than ‘what’. As long as we’re conscientiously and skillfully developing these three elements of how Big Brains understand and interact with the world, then our activities can be pretty arbitrary and just as much based in practical constraints and happenstance as anything else. But since we can’t directly see input—process—output, we find it more palatable to discuss the physical platforms through which we explore these elements. In other words, our activities are the lightning in our Big Brain Storms. Part two of this series will consider the thunder.

In Part 1 of our Anatomy of a Superlative Big Brain Adventure, we looked at how we determined that our recent BBS field trip to Carkeek Park was a success. As challenging and ambiguous as it may be to make such a determination, understanding and articulating the tools that were employed to facilitate the event’s success is an infinitely more challenging and ambiguous task. For starters, it all begins with Big Brains—Who are they? What inspires and motivates them, individually and collectively? What are their strengths and concerns?—etc. For instance, you wouldn’t take just any random set of kids off the street and set them loose in an oceanside forest with $$$ worth of technology for half a day (well, maybe you would, but we wouldn’t). So, let’s stipulate that not all our actual inputs will be enumerated in this one catalog and instead try to capture the overall gist of what we consider to be our known inputs.

Seattle Parks staff and volunteers and their substantive commitment to facilitating a field trip that maximizes positive Big Brain development;

Big-Brained Superhero Buddies and volunteers and our collective commitment to try hard, be kind, and have fun.

As ambiguous as it seems, we know trust when we deploy and experience it, and for this adventure to be a success, we definitely needed it.

Input #2: Space and freedom to explore

Carkeek Park and all the diverse environments and experiences it offers combined with 3+ hours for Big Brains to explore those offerings made for an invaluable and incomparable Big Brain adventure. We could go on about the relative freedom Big Brains had to explore this place in their own time in their own way, but then we may be circling back to trust already. So, let’s keep fixated on the environment, which was fully stocked with curiosity stimulants, as evident in the 700+ photos and videos Big Brains captured, such as:

Because these are just some of the many many things they took pictures of, we have to assume that these are just some of many many things that interested Big Brains on this field trip. And because not all of the Big Brains photographed these same objects, we have to assume that a wide diversity of potential curiosity stimulants mattered as did the freedom for Big Brains to observe them.

Input #3: Care

Being hugely resource-intensive for us, field trips are never simply a box-checking exercise in The Big-Brained Superheroes Club. So, if we’re going to do them, we’re going to do everything we can to give ourselves the highest probability that we’ll feel a sense of success afterward. Care facilitates our success in so many ways because it’s fundamentally based in knowing who Big-Brained Superheroes are, as individuals and as a group. For our Big-Brained Superheroes on this particular trip, care came in several forms:

Rubber boots: Our Big Brains don’t have them, and luckily for us, Seattle Parks employee, Anne, thought of that and brought them. These boots also contributed to the freedom for Big Brains to explore. We also had ponchos ready just in case. On our next outdoor adventure, we’ll probably also add spare socks and fleece jackets to our care package, just in case.

An abundance of Brain food: As they frequently acknowledge, Big Brains are highly susceptible to feeling competitive for resources. We’ve seen such competitiveness diminish all areas of a Big Brain’s capacity, including openness to new ideas and experiences, enough to know that food is one area on which we do not skimp. Ever. No stale solitary PB&Js for our Big Brains.

Rewards: There must be a sense of adventure center of the brain because when a reward—no matter how vague or undefined or inconsequential—is on the table, it captures Big Brain interest. As long as there is no competition involved in the process, we use small rewards to help Big Brains feel validated in their superpower-development work.

Mom:

Mom makes everything better, and we were insanely lucky that Mama Rahima joined in on this adventure. May we always be so lucky!

Input #4: Enhanced Reality

Big Brains love creative adventure and exploration as much as anyone, but enhancing that foundation with profoundly diverse elective opportunities for more in-depth thinking and understanding is really what helps nerd up this and all BBS field trips. In this case, reality was enhanced in two significant ways:

Knowledgeable Seattle Parks employees and volunteers were not only part of the Big Brain field trip entourage, but Parks naturalists were also actively working throughout the park counting, measuring, and dissecting salmon right before our eyes. Great in itself, what was more important was that, while they were working, naturalists were always open to being interrupted by questions from Big Brains. For Big Brains, Parks naturalists were like Siri in blue jackets.

Big Brains carried iPod cameras in waterproof cases, enabling them to capture and frame their unique experiences in their own ways. Not only do those tools enhance the ability of Big Brains to own their experiences in the moment, they provide another way to build on those experiences in the future.

So, there we go. Our outputs and inputs for a superlative Big Brain adventure. If we had more time, we’d also talk about the process, but we’ll leave that for another day. In the meantime, we’re thrilled to thank:

Seattle Parks and Recreation

4Culture

Seattle Department of Neighborhoods

Seattle University

Mama Rahima and all the other Big Brain guardians who made it possible.

Thanks to a series of dedicated individuals from Yesler Community Center, Seattle Parks Environmental Education, and Seattle University combined with funding from Seattle University, Seattle Parks Advisory Council, Seattle Neighborhoods, 4Culture, and individual contributors, Big Brains got the unanticipated privilege of engaging with our environment in a whole new way in 2017. These diverse interactions throughout the latter part of the year culminated in a truly superlative Big Brain voyage through Seattle’s Carkeek Park one chilly Saturday in November.

What are the outputs that indicate the success of this event? And what are the inputs that helped make it successful? Great questions. So glad you asked!

Outputs

First, our success criteria for Big Brain field trips are typically:

Did Big Brains have lots of fun?

Did Big Brains nerd it up?

In that order. (We’ve discussed the rationale for this perspective quite a bit.)

We also regularly go out of our way to get input from Big Brains who we know to be the most brutal in their honesty. Typically, the feedback from those unfiltered Brains after an event corresponds well with our impressions during the event. In this case, we got an unalloyed, “It was fun!”, from all concerned parties, which was not remotely surprising to anyone.

Finally, we look for clues as to how a field trip may have affected our community after-the-fact. While this story is complicated by external factors, including other things going on in The BBSC or Yesler community around the time of the event, we still like to see BBSC participation and engagement levels increase a bit. But because this particular field trip had to occur during a time we were technically closed for renovations, the clues were slightly tougher to come by. However, when a couple of weeks after the event, we overheard one of our more brutally honest Brains tell his friend that, “Big Brains has the best field trips,” we felt pretty confident that a good time was had by all.

Criteria 2: Nerd it Up indicators include the number and quality of questions asked during the trip and, ideally, some suggestion that Big Brains came away from it with an expanded view of the world/universe and their individual/collective place in it. In this case, Big Brains were armed with 10 iPods and collectively captured over 700 photos and videos of their field trip experience, which, in our view, is a pretty nerdy thing to do. They also independently and enthusiastically peppered Park volunteers and employees with dozens of questions throughout the event:

And while it’s always tough to tell how/if this event expanded our Brains’ view of the world/universe and their individual/collective place in it, early indicators suggest at least some positive impressions. For instance, walking away from the park, one Big Brain spontaneously described herself as “a nature person.” And now that our open house is over, we expect to be referring back to the images that Big Brains captured on this field trip for artistic and technological inspiration in the coming year. So, in that sense, the final Nerdiness score for this event is still yet to be calculated, but because the Lots of Fun indicators were high, we expect the long-term Nerd level to follow in the same direction.

Part Two (Our Inputs) of Anatomy of a Superlative Big Brain Adventure is forthcoming. Stay tuned…

As part of our interest in Critical Thinking, we like to explode standard concepts and ways of looking at the world. As many of our Big Brains had never before questioned the foundations of base-10 as a number system, we figured we’d challenge their assumptions of its normalcy by introducing them to a new number system. Through this process, we gain a method of distinguishing the role of a number system’s symbols from that of its structural rules.

Exploring binary is another way for us to explore switches and digital logic.

Learning binary as a number system is helpful in case we ever want to delve into binary code.

After the flip cards, one of our sidekicks decided to build a binary counter and bring it in for Brains to play with, turning binary counting into a bit of a competitive sport in The BBSC:

Once we had our functional prototype, Google Foundation was kind enough to grant us the funds for a whole team of Big Brains to design, code, and build a full version of the binary counter on which Big Brains continue to learn and teach binary within the Yesler community and throughout Seattle:

Cardboard Godzilla’s humble origins date back to late 2015, as we were nearing the end of our second or third stage of development on our City of Light, when one (or more) Brains suggested the need for a villain. A complexly powerful symbol of the folly of men, Godzilla was the obvious choice. So, on December 31st, Big Brain Buddy Eva deftly made the first cut of what, so far, has been a year-long intermittent creation of several Brains.

Through Godzilla, Brains have explored and explained the fundamental concept of input, process, output:

Brains have learned about and played with servos:

And Brains have developed a bit of hardware and software in the process:

But mostly, through Godzilla, Brains have exercised Persistence and Adaptability. Poor Cardboard Godzilla has been up and down, on and off his S-hook, at least ten or fifteen times over the last year. His first animation involved his LED eye and “roaring sound” that initiate when the door to The BBSC Lair is open. Then, came his “fire breath”, which happens next in the loop. Finally (so far), his back arm also moves up and down in the process. In that sense, Cardboard Godzilla is our first home-made robotic platform—a tool for exercising all the superpowers as well as helpful motivation for developing new skills.

We want Godzilla to declare, “I’m going to destroy your city!”? Well, we’re going to have to figure out how to do that.

It’s this almost magical ability to inspire and facilitate iteration that makes art, specifically art made by Big-Brained Superheroes out of real-world junk, so valuable to The Big-Brained Superheroes Club. It’s a special kind of burden for a giant piece of cardboard to serve as an outlet for so many different Big Brains imagining, making, breaking, reimagining, and making again, but somehow, Cardboard Godzilla has managed to carry it for a little over a year now. If he weren’t such a complexly powerful symbol and quirky labor of love, it’s unlikely he would have been able to handle it. And in spite of all the ups and downs, he hasn’t even neared his half-life yet. Go Go Godzilla!

Bonus: Cardboard Godzilla has also helped introduce a whole new Big Brain generation to a cult classic:

You should donate because this isn’t any standard program. This program it is not run by adults. The kids run the program, and this is good because this shows the kids how it is in the real world. We also teach S.T.E.A.M, and we teach the kids to ask specific questions. “I need help!!”, you can say it, but you got to be specific.

This is an important program for me because it shows girls that S.T.E.A.M is for all genders. I didn’t believe this till i came to Big Brains.

In the beginning, it seems simple and straightforward enough. You see a bunch of kids doing not much of anything fantastic outside of school, and you ask them what it would take to get them doing something fantastic. They tell you. You then bring your own interests and caveats to the table. Negotiations ensue. Fantastic stuff starts to happen. Done and done.

Or so it seems.

Starting off this thing as an all-volunteer endeavor—everyone pitching in their own time and resources—is what made it possible in the first place. We were lucky. But luck doesn’t necessarily last. Or scale. So, off we go in search of outside resources.

Lucky again, the first grant application we had ever written was approved by Seattle’s Technology Matching Fund. Of course, this isn’t money to just make fantastic stuff happen. This is money for a project, planned out a year in advance, with outcomes specified a year in advance. Money that we needed to match with our own time and resources. Still. Money!

Thanks to the City of Seattle Community Technology Program (and SparkFun and Google and Blucora and several other places) for tools and materials and to Yesler Community Center for program space, we started to build our STEAM lab. Still all volunteers, still all doing fantastic stuff outside of school.

And apparently, in this case, “if you build it, they will come,” is for real. More and more Big-Brained Superheroes were coming to do fantastic stuff after school. The extent of our outreach was showing up and talking to the kids in the hall. Mostly asking them math problems. That’s it.

As demand grew, our search for resources grew more intense. We formed a board full of Yesler moms and BBSC volunteers. We checked all the items off the list: 501c3 status—check, Washington State business licenses—check, insurance and bookkeeping services—check and check. And all that stuff required was more time and money. Money! Thanks to the Satterberg and Norcliffe foundations, we got that stuff done.

But we still need to run a program four days a week.

So, off we go in search of more resources. And the more we search, the more we fully realize why there aren’t more Big-Brained Superheroes Clubs throughout the land. It’s not as if no one’s thought of this before. Problem: not enough fantastic stuff happening. Solution: Talk to people, make fantastic stuff happen. Achievement unlocked. Ironically, that’s the part that seems the most obvious to everyone. The part that few seem to get down is finding the resources to keep it going.

And our first successful grant yields a clue: project. Project project project. Everyone loves projects! We’ve done lots and lots of projects. Projects planned years in advance even. With outcomes set years in advance even. But when we go back to what Big-Brained Superheroes like Muz love best about The BBSC, it’s:

This program it is not run by adults. The kids run the program, and this is good because this shows the kids how it is in the real world.

Muz is eleven years old. The thing that, to her, makes The BBSC special is that eleven year-olds like her get to come in and, through various negotiations and caveats, make their own decisions about their own fantastic projects. Any eleven year-old that can meaningfully define a project and set outcomes a year in advance is an eleven year-old that has no need for The Big-Brained Superheroes Club. Muz’s independent projects are not getting supported by project grants anytime soon.

And that, among many other reasons, is why Big Brains like Muz need you! Muz’s radical agenda is to have the tools, resources, and support she needs to pursue her interests and develop her superpowers. She’s not in The BBSC to raise her grades or gain workforce skills (though she may be doing those things, that’s not her agenda). She’s in it to do fantastic stuff outside of school. And we’re in it to help her do fantastic stuff outside of school.

We’ve been lucky to find a few organizations (yay BECU!) that support a ‘do fantastic stuff’ agenda. But those are few and far between. And the paradox is that, without this underlying baseline of support, the projects that everyone else wants don’t happen. Our agenda may be radical, but sometimes, being radical is the only way to get the job done.

Please consider supporting The BBSC this holiday season! We promise to make lots of fantastic stuff happen outside of school.

“Being interested and engaged in life is the single most important pathway to success.” -President Barack Obama

Let’s be honest: sometimes you simply just don’t want to do the things you probably should do. Such was the case for us when we learned about the White House National #WeekofMaking happening in June. Our reluctance to engage in this initiative may seem paradoxical given our obvious predisposition toward everything the event was about. But exactly because every week is a week of making for us, making a big deal out of one week just seemed…unnecessary. That, combined with the event’s scheduling conflict with Yesler’s Juneteenth celebrations, inspired little more than hesitation in us. However, the persistent dedication to the event shown by Andrew Coy and the rest of the Making team in OSTP finally compelled us to get over ourselves and get the job done.

In our experience there are two main methods for getting a job done. In one way, Willpower and Persistence are the primary mechanisms for accomplishing the goal, and you just suck it up and do what needs to be done to get through it. We call this “the box-checking method”. The other main way primarily requires Sense of Adventure and Creativity, and rather than simply powering through all the job’s attendant complexities and discordances to find the most direct path to the checked box, you embrace those complexities and discordances and zigzag between them until the box becomes something of actual interest to you. We call this “the fun way”.

(Obviously, jobs can involve both methods to different degrees at different times, but many influencing factors—the type of job, the amount of time and other resources you have to do it, the constraints involved, and your own interests and motivations—can make a huge difference in which method predominates.)

Big Brains generally spend a huge portion of their young lives checking boxes. Go to school; do your homework; read this book; etc. They have tons of experience in that particular method of getting the job done (and often failing to get the job done). Consequently, The BBSC is necessarily designed around doing things “the fun way”. It takes significantly longer and involves way more work, but we, like President Obama, find that learning to do life the fun way is the single most important pathway to success.

For us, doing National Week of Making the fun way involved exploring the unique history of Juneteenth and illustrating the connections between the events and people that eventually made it happen. And so we put together a bunch of materials we had lying around to make an electric circuit out of history:

This is the kind of project that, as one Big Brain succinctly put it, “makes nerdiness cool.” Nearly every Big Brain had a hand in its development and, therefore, had an investment in its outcome. And by viewing the National Week of Making through the Juneteenth historical lens, we not only came away with a more complex understanding of our history, we now have a new (for us) platform for storytelling that we’re already deploying in other contexts.

So, for being an instigator and determined supporter of making, Big-Brained Superheroes would like to earnestly say, “Thanks, Obama!”

Considering getting more involved in making and tinkering? Here are some Big Brain recommended resources:

The Tinkering Studio (website, YouTube, Google+, Twitter): We can’t express enough love for the ingenuity, style, and generosity of the folks at the Tinkering Studio in San Francisco’s Exploratorium. If you see something you like in The BBSC, these folks likely played some role in its design. No matter how much tinkering/making you do, reading their book and taking their online course are guaranteed to teach you something new and valuable! Their Facilitation Field Guide: also quite helpful.

For our part, as we sometimes mention in our Origin Stories, The BBSC didn’t necessarily develop as a “tinkering/maker space” as much as it evolved as a community-driven exercise in recreational nerdiness. In other words, we just wanted more hands-on ways to work out our brains, and so, we have honed in on a mishmash of tinkering/making/other tools, activities, and techniques to help us do that. If anything, we may often start with something that community members enjoy or find value in and “nerd it up” by any means necessary. This is where we find the most fun.

When discussing how we should organize our materials, a Big Brain suggested the old “art materials over here and electronics parts over here” approach. To mess with her brain, we gave her team a box of old circuit boards given to us by Interconnection and asked them to do something with them. So, they went ahead and discovered Planet Technology.

We may talk a lot about our big nerdy projects and heady ambitions, but in many ways, the heart of The Big-Brained Superheroes Club is play. Super Shortie Corner was created in a small corner of the lair during our recent clean (and build) week for the express purpose of encouraging imaginative and educational play in the five-and-under set. It’s been a surprise to see the space being used by Brains of all ages for playing, inventing, and creating entire imaginary universes and scenarios to wrap around their activities. Any phony toughness or competitiveness here gets quickly rebuffed because Kindness and Teamwork are the minimum requirements.

We don’t talk much about “discipline” in the Big Brains for the simple reason that we’re not looking for discipline (in the usual sense of the word) from the Brains. It’s not enough for our Brains to just gain the capability to refrain from hurting each other or themselves with their actions. To realize their full potential, Brains must also gain that feeling of liberation that comes from cooperation and collaboration. Willpower and Respect—our version of “discipline”—are only two of the twelve superpowers that can help them gain that liberation. For all the rest, they need motivation and permission, both of which they are somehow getting in this teeny tiny corner of the room. Such a pleasant surprise!

Not only did we finally find a use for our tree, we found unexpected value in our bag of donated jellyfish.

Which, of course, only increases the pun potential (puntential?) of this project.

So there we are. A little Creativity, some Critical Thinking, Persistence, and Teamwork, and then there was (more) light.

Best project takeaway: We know we’re very much on the right track when the most common response to seeing a club member standing on a table wrapping a tree in copper tape isn’t, “What the heck are you doing?”, but rather, “Can I help?”.

Thank you again to Ballard Reuse and all Big-Brained Superheroes Club supporters who help make these randomly invaluable projects possible!

If you’ve been keeping tabs on our Facebook page, then you know that we’ve been working on our City of Light on and off for a while now. Once we got proof-of-concept with the basic buildings and determined the resistance level needed for our LEDs, we turned our attention to constructing our Space Needle.

And that’s where we are.

Still.

Of all the factors related to our Space Needle’s design and construction—determining dimensions, features, materials, etc—finding a way to achieve basic structural integrity (ie, sticking the parts together) has been our toughest challenge so far. Some of that is just the nature of this particular beast: it has to be both strong and extremely lightweight so as not to break apart or cause injury should it come un-velcroed from our felt wall. Some of that is just the nature of The BBSC: our repertoire of materials for sticking stuff together has been mostly limited to glue (hot and not), tape, and solder, none of which have been particularly useful for our Space Needle yet.

To meet our requirements, given our constraints, we have used our development time to exercise our Persistence and Adaptability. The joints of our Space Needle “legs”, for instance, have undergone at least four iterations:

Soldering was no good as the large swaths of aluminum just sucked up the heat.

We tried a cold weld two-part epoxy on its own at each joint only to have them all break. One by one.

We then cut some thin metal rectangles and epoxied them to the backs of the legs to hold the joints together, but the bends in the legs made it difficult to get anything with a straight edge to hold to both sides of the joint equally well so failure inevitably ensued.

Our final (so far) solution: Pennies*. Not as lightweight as we’d like, but they’re the right shape and seem to get the job done.

It’s tempting here to start spouting pithy quotes about failure and how it’s just a point (or several points) on the path to success etc etc etc. But what’s more interesting to us is understanding just what enables us to keep going through our failures to find, even momentary, success. We see failure, like we see Empowerment, as a luxury good:

For starters, we need Brains. More than one, in this case, with diverse sets of knowledge and abilities.

Second, we need time. We’re constantly learning as we go, and consequently, our iterations often require time for us to confer, casually ponder, and enable our Creativity superpower to do its job.

Third, we need capital resources. Tools, materials with which to experiment, and money with which to acquire supplies as we go are all essential even for the most minimal of projects, such as this one.

Finally, we need motivation and Empowerment. Not only do we need to want to do it, we need to feel like it’s at least possible. Not surprisingly, it helps when the complexity of a project is somewhat obscured from the outset so as to enable escalation of commitment.

Simple? Maybe. Obvious? Probably. And it doesn’t take very much reading between the lines here to glimpse at least a few of the social, cultural, and economic underpinnings needed to achieve even the teeniest tiniest of successes. These are the real legs on which our Space Needle is built. So, where does that urge to spout the pithy quote even come from anyway?

So, in February, we hosted this great Re-Maker Fest, which was inspiring and informative and all kinds of brain-embiggening, and, not coincidentally, has us reconsidering failure (again). In the course of that event, we made a challenge for ourselves to see how many things we could remake before the end of the month (in this case, it turned out to be within the next three BBSC meetings). The results:

We started off strong—taking apart this doll in the hopes of turning it into something new. And we did turn it into something new: a collection of doll parts. That’s something.

And then, as we mentioned in our previous post, we attempted to turn some broken crayon bits and leftover cardboard into artwork. In summary: If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you try to put a new spin (literally) on melty crayon art, now you know.

Finally, we combined our magnetized electronics, a metal vent thingy, some vellum paper and tiny clothespins (all of these items are used items) with a bunch of shapes we had lying around to make a light play box. The takeaway: Add some magnets and a bit of string and maybe we’ve found a new crazy/creepy use for that doll parts collection.

From our point-of-view, these remaking experiences are just part of the process. A process that some might look at and think is a waste of perfectly good broken dolls, crayons, and random parts. And if the remaking process ended here, we would probably agree. But it doesn’t and it won’t. Which is why this is just part 1 of x of our Remaking Failure.

This inherited tree has been a point of contention in The BBSC for a while now. At first, we thought we’d manage it by decorating it with squishy shapes:

Not bad. But the leaky sand box in which it stood was eternally messy, and the groovy shapes kept falling off or getting repurposed elsewhere. What to do?

Since the sand was the biggest issue, we dealt with that first. Several Big Brains took it outside and held a fairly extravagant de-sanding party (i.e., they dumped the sand onto the ground, played in it for over an hour, and finally swept it away). From there, we just shuffled the precariously perched naked tree around the room until we could settle on a plan.

“Burn it,” was one Big Brain’s suggestion. Not really an option since the tree had a history and sentimental value for some of our Big Brains.

After bandying about a string of ideas of what to make it—an evolutionary tree, a bunch of branches, etc—we decided to table it. Literally, we decided to put it in the middle of the room’s biggest table. But first, we needed to make a sturdy stand for it (and thanks to a generous gift certificate from Ballard Reuse, we were able to do so):

Once we figured out where and how to put up the tree, the rest of the plan fell into place.

Another issue we’ve had for a while is that we’ve wanted more diverse lighting sources in the lair. Especially in the winter when the coldness of the overhead fluorescents becomes particularly apparent. Combine that need with a pretty decent supply of wired LEDs, copper tape, and silicon jellyfish, and the result is somewhat obvious:

We know. It’s been over a month since our Holiday Fund for the Nerdy drive ended (for us, the holidays go through February). So, let’s see where the Big-Brained Superheroes are now, shall we?

BBS Accelerator is actually happening! By popular demand, we’re experimenting with opening up the lair on Friday evening so that Accelerator members can work on their projects. While regular club meetings are still holding strong on Mondays and Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays are when the nerdiness goes to eleven.

Re-Maker Fest happened and we are still working on posting all the things we remade in February. Oh wait, here’s a thing:

Yeah. Remaking. If it’s being done well and in an innovative way, it takes time and care. And experimentation. Which also takes time and care. In short, a lot of time and a lot of care. And, of course, this means that remaking is an excellent way for our Big Brains to exercise their superpowers. Because sometimes the only thing we can learn to expect is the unexpected.

We’ve also just started a gardening program, in which Seattle Parks provides the seeds, and we design and maintain two planting beds out back of the community center. So far, Jack, our lead gardener sidekick, has worked with Big Brains to weed, fix the beds, and plant some sort of bean. User-centered designed birdhouses and bird feeders are also in-progress for the garden.

Those tiny tombstone-looking things in there are popsicle stick plant markers. We’ll be posting updates on how our garden grows.

Now that we’ve mentioned some of the Brain building, let’s mention some of the builders. None of these activities would happen without these organizations:

And then there’s people like you! All the individuals out there who help make our Big-Brained Superheroes grow. Thank you for all you do!

Thanks, in part, to a generous laptop discount from Interconnection, one superpowerful Big-Brained Superhero had the tools he needed to both begin development on his Arduino-driven video game and work on his Powerpoint presentation for his science class, making this Superhacker Saturday one for the record books! Let the games begin.